You try to stay positive, but nothing seems to work. To make matters worse, you’re already exhausted because you slept in and had to skip your morning coffee.

So when you finally get to work, you can’t help but wonder how you could possibly get ahead on the mountain of tasks you have to do today.

The truth is that negative situations are inevitable and happen to us all.

The trick, then, is to be proactive and have a plan in place to counter them when they do.

Here are 7 easy ways to see the positive in everything that happens to you.

1) You Can Always Choose What You Fixate On

Sometimes when you focus so strongly on the negative things in your life, your mind gets blurry.

You lose focus because you start to get discouraged and soon that becomes all you can see.

But what if you viewed your setbacks in a positive way?

The next time you experience adversity in your life, choose to see it as an experience and something to learn from in your future. Remind yourself what you are grateful for to avoid slipping into negative tracks of thinking.

If you choose to see the good in everything, your mind will reward you for it.

2) Don’t Expect Good Things to Happen

William Shakespeare said that “expectation is the root of all heartache.”

In other words, if you expect good things to happen and they don’t, you’re only setting yourself up for failure.

Life doesn’t care about your intentions. Life doesn’t care that you want to have a positive day because it will make things happen to you, good or bad, regardless of how you feel.

And the sooner you accept that, the sooner you can start incorporating greatness into every day.

3) Always Ask: “How Did I Get Here?”

If you are where you are now, what really got you here?

Was it luck, chance, hard work, opportunity? Or something else?

Be honest with yourself.

If you know what you did to get where you are right now—deserved or not—how can you adapt your circumstances to achieve the future you want to see in your own life today?

4) Relish the Small Things

Focusing on the small things can catapult you 10x forward on your way to a more positive life.

It sounds like a cliché, but it works.

Because if you don’t stop to smell the roses, one day you may look back and wonder “why did I move so hastily through everything, instead of enjoying life after all?”

5) Do Random Acts of Kindness Every Day

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself.”

Don’t be frustrated at others when they don’t do something your way.

Instead, go out of your way to be courteous and perform one little random act of kindness for others every day.

6) Don’t Forget to Vent

Sometimes the worst thing we can do is try to reject our feelings and bury them under more positive ones.

So instead of feeling like you shouldn’t be angry or sad, try embracing these negative attitudes as they come.

It seems paradoxical, but adopting a state of constant acceptance in your life can help you be more positive in the long term.

7) Empathize with Others Constantly

Empathy is important. It’s key to understanding one another and a cornerstone when it comes to building friendships and forging new connections in our lives.

As Stephen Covey says, we each have our own paradigms. These viewpoints shape how we see the world and define what’s right and what’s wrong, what we like and don’t like, and what we choose to see and focus on around us.

Yet it’s not always easy to understand where someone else is coming from. Because, as Covey mentions, these paradigms mould our personalities and shape what we choose to see by giving us something resembling what we want to see out of every person or situation.

Yet, when someone violates our paradigm, we get offended. In cases like these, it can be helpful to step outside of ourselves and ask what would make a person act in a way we may find offensive.

For example, we can ask:

What are they going through? What battle are they fighting we know nothing about? How would I feel if I was them right now, experiencing what they have to go through every day?

It’s helpful to step back outside of ourselves and realize that if we were somebody else, we would be doing exactly what they’re doing right now because we’d be feeling exactly as they are right now.

By adopting these behaviours, we can adopt a positive understanding of the world around us.

It starts with understanding ourselves first, so that we can better interact with others and see the good out of everything, rather than the negative.

If we can do that, we can effectively set ourselves on a grand journey to come.